Better Roads

September 2013

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HighwayContractor
By Daniel C. Brown, Contributing Editor
AMERICAN CONCRETE
PAVEMENT ASSOCIATION
Breaking
the Mold
High-production paving
on 4-inch overlay
I
t took an Illinois contractor eight days of elapsed
time to pave a 4-inch concrete overlay on 4 1/2
miles of Illinois 53, a four-lane divided roadway.
D Construction, an American Concrete Pavement
Association (ACPA) member, placed approximately 125,350
square yards of the concrete overlay this past year on a composite pavement of asphalt over concrete.
"We milled off all of the asphalt in some areas, so in those
areas, we were pouring over the old Route 66 concrete," says
Lester Cheney, concrete superintendent for D Construction, Coal
City, Illinois. "But we mainly paved over asphalt.
"This was a bonded overlay," Cheney says. "We had no bond
breaker. We cleaned it thoroughly. We had sweepers and laborers
with blowpipes hooked to a compressor. We would start early
in the morning the day of a pour and let the laborers get a few
hundred feet ahead of us. Every day, we were cleaning."
The contractor paved the two northbound lanes in late May
14
and the two southbound lanes in August. "We were right
around 2,000 cubic yards per day," Cheney says.
A number of factors contributed to the rapid execution of
paving for the $3.4 million project, according to Randell Riley,
P.E., executive director/engineer for the Illinois Chapter, ACPA.
Riley assisted the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT)
with the design of the 4-inch concrete overlay, which was sawcut into 4-by-4-foot panels.
Because this was an overlay project, the concrete contained
no steel. The contractor added 4 pounds per cubic yard of
Grace Construction Products Strux 90/40 synthetic structural
ﬁbers and paved 25 feet wide. D Construction's crews could
pick up concrete in end dumps at a central mix plant and
discharge directly in front of the paver. There were no dowel
baskets to pin to the grade.
D Construction used a GOMACO GHP 2800 paver with Leica
Geosystems' PaveSmart 3D stringless control system. Stringless
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